The Transcript

How to Effectively Publish on LinkedIn, Part 2

Voieover: This is The Missing Link with your host, the insufferable, but never boring, Sean Jackson.

Sean Jackson: Hello everyone. It’s Sean Jackson, your host. I’m joined, as always, by the illuminating, Mica Gadhia. Mica, how are you today?

Mica Gadhia: I am awesome Sean. How are you?

Sean Jackson: You know what, I am doing very much better. Let me explain why. The last episode we did — let’s just be honest, my audio was horrible. I’m going to explain to my audience what the heck happened, because it’s actually a pretty funny story. I am on trips right now — traveling a little bit. When I have to do this podcast it’s always a little difficult, because I don’t have my sound booth back in Dallas.

On my trip I decided I would buy one of those headsets that have a microphone, because I figured that would be an easy way to do it. I won’t have to worry about all the noise around me, because they have a noise-canceling mics. So I bought this mic, and I had it shipped to me — overnighted. I put it on and I recorded a show with Mica. It was terrible. So bad that our engineer said, “You’re going to have to redo the show Sean.” It was like, “Okay.” Do you remember when Steve Martin did standup? He had that whole routine about the googlephonic stereo and the moonrock needle? You remember that Mica?

Mica Gadhia: I don’t.

Sean Jackson: You don’t?

Mica Gadhia: Actually I don’t, sorry.

Sean Jackson: Oh my God, it was hilarious. It was about how he was trying to get this stereo fixed up. For anyone over the age of 40, I guess, you will know what the heck I’m talking about. Okay fine, Mica. Let me go through this. I get this thing and I’m putting it on. It’s terrible, so we have to re-record. I’m like, “I’m not going to let that happen again.” So I go buy another headphone-microphone combination set. A better one. A more expensive one. They send it to me, and we record the show. I listened to the live version. I was like, “God, this sounds terrible too.” I was getting frustrated.

Then I run over to Walmart. I go and buy some cardboard, some glue, and some seat cushions. I build a little sound box. I put it into where I’m staying, and I start to do some test recording. I’m like, “This still sounds like crap too.” I was like, “Maybe it’s the room I’m recording in.” I could not find any decent place. I say, “You know what? I’m going to go to the hotel front desk. I’m going to see if they could help me.” I walk down to the hotel front desk — with my microphone, my cardboard box with seat cushions — went up to the front desk guy and say, “Excuse me, do you have a private room I could use for maybe an hour?” The look on his face was priceless.

Mica Gadhia: That’s so awesome.

Sean Jackson: Luckily, I was able to find a place. Even though as embarrassing as it was to walk around with my box and microphone and looking for a ‘private place,’ I do it because of this, Mica. I love our audience so much that I want to give them our very best. Don’t you agree Mica?

Mica Gadhia: Yeah. You are so dedicated.

Sean Jackson: It’s because of them. We’re on this journey together. I’m learning just like they’re learning. We’re doing it together. I will tell you, this series that we’re doing about publishing on LinkedIn I think is so important. I do want to give a shoutout to Jeff and to Rob who took the Mica Challenge from last week. Who published some posts and allowed us to come through and provide some insight to them. Jeff and Rob — totally appreciate you doing that, by the way, because that really helped us. It gave us a good starting point in this overall journey. Those members in our group — like Bonnie who helped initiate this whole conversation — all those group members, I cannot thank you enough. Yes, it is worth me walking around with a box and a microphone to a front desk —

Mica Gadhia: It is!

Sean Jackson: — and ask for a little privacy, because you guys are absolutely worth it. Mica, I bet you there’s somebody listening that has no clue what we’re talking about.

Mica Gadhia: Oh, maybe they don’t. Let’s teach them.

Sean Jackson: Yes, let’s illuminate them.

Mica Gadhia: Let’s illuminate them. We’re going to invite you to our super-secret Missing Link LinkedIn group, which is amazing. Full of promotions — that I’ve just added two more yesterday, as well, to help with publishing posts. If you’re in the continental United States, you’re going to go ahead and take out your mobile device and text us at 41411. The keyword in there will be ‘mylink’ — ‘mylink’ without the space. Again, that’s 41411 text, and ‘mylink’ is the keyword. Now, if you’re outside of the continental United States, we want you to join us as well. You can do that through an email at MissingLink@Rainmaker.FM.

Sean Jackson: It’s super simple. It’s super easy. And I encourage everyone to do it. Here’s why. Mica is like a fiend in that group, posting tons of resources. You were posting something about Canva, was that it, that you were just putting in there?

Mica Gadhia: Yeah, I just made my LinkedIn image on Canva. It was very easy, and I did it for free.

Sean Jackson: You did it for free. If you need images for posting, then, by all means — we have all these resources in that group, so make sure you’re in there. Again, some of the great discussions that are going on. Especially a big shoutout to Jeff and Rob for participating in the Mica Challenge and letting us take a look at it. Again, I think you owe it to yourself to get in.

All right. That’s enough of the group. I want to give a preview of the episode because we have a very special guest all the way from South Africa. He has written a book on LinkedIn, and not just any book. He is actually a data scientist. He has done a huge amount of research on publishing to LinkedIn, what works, what doesn’t.

When we get back from the break, our very special guest is going to talk about information that you must know if you are going to publish on LinkedIn. I don’t want to spoil it because I know you want to hear it directly from the source. So stay tuned. When we come back, we are going to deep-dive into LinkedIn publishing.

Mica Gadhia: The Missing Link is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, the complete website solution for content marketers and online entrepreneurs. Find out more and take a free, 14-day test drive at Rainmaker.FM/Platform.

Sean Jackson: Welcome back from the break everyone. It’s Sean Jackson and Mica Gadhia. I promised you we were going to go deep-diving into LinkedIn Pulse and LinkedIn publishing. To do that, we have a very special guest. Our first international guest, actually, Mica, right? All the way from —

Mica Gadhia: That’s right.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, I’m pretty impressed. It was late for him but it’s early for us. Without further ado, I would like to introduce him. I’m going to mess this name up, so everyone forgive me. Gericke Point — Oh heck. Gericke I’m going to let you do it because we’re just going to mangle it. I want you to introduce yourself and then I want to tell everybody about how we met.

Gericke:
Hi, Sean. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. I know that we’re going to learn a lot about LinkedIn publishing today. My name is Gericke Potgieter, but I don’t really expect people across the world to be able to pronounce that. I often joke and say I’ve probably got the most unmarketable name in the industry, so that’s why a lot of people sometimes just call me Eric or G.

Sean Jackson: Ah, there, now you tell me.

Gericke: Put you out.

Sean Jackson: I want to tell everyone how we got together. When I first started this show, you sent me an email and you said, “Look, I really enjoy your show. I wrote this book, and I think you will find it hugely valuable. Can I give you a free copy?” Just that was it. Of course, I get the book, and I’m like, “Oh, whatever.” Then about a couple of weeks ago I’m like, “You know, I want to do a show on LinkedIn Pulse. Who was that guy again with the crazy-sounding name that sent me that free book?” I got it. I read it. I was blown away.

I highly recommend — everyone has to buy this book. Because, one, it’s on Amazon. B, it’s very inexpensive — it’s less than five bucks. It is chock full of information. Literally, I was reading this thing and I was going, “Oh my gosh! This guy, does he have a job? How did he do?” — forever because it covers everything in it. I want you to tell our audience a little bit of the background on how you created “How to Feature on LinkedIn Pulse,” the book that you wrote. The research you did. Some of the conclusions that you have. Because I am going to pepper you with a ton of questions.

Gericke: Perfect. To give you some background, we wrote the book — ‘we’ would be my wife and I. We actually work together at Artifex Knowledge Engineering. Our company focuses on the automation of business processes. Specifically if you have Excel spreadsheets, that kind of thing. We automate all of those things. In our efforts to market our own company, we decided to publish on LinkedIn Pulse, or rather, on the LinkedIn publisher platform to see what happens from there. Not much happened initially, to be honest. I personally wrote a lot of articles and published them, and would get maybe a couple of views, one or two comments.

One day, I decided to write about big data. For some reason that we didn’t understand initially, the big data article just went through the roof in terms of views. That really piqued my interest. So what I did, is I looked a little bit deeper and found that the article was actually featured in the big data channel on LinkedIn Pulse. I looked to my partner and I said, “You know what? Let’s see if we can repeat the success. And let’s figure out what we did in order to get this article to feature.” That’s what we did. I wrote a second article, also in the big data field. That article also went through the roof in terms of views. That prompted us to ask the question, “But what are we doing right?”

Sean Jackson: Yeah. Is it pure luck, or was there really some science behind it?

Gericke: Precisely. Digging a little deeper, we found out that there’s a very interesting algorithm at the back working its magic that allowed us to pull into the Pulse channels. We went about — it took us about two and a half to three weeks to perform the study. We did take some care to look at other studies that was performed specifically by people like Paul Shapiro, for example, and to see what they did and how we can do it differently. So that we can really dig into this algorithm and understand what it does. Because if you can repeat success, why not?

Sean Jackson: Right, exactly.

Gericke: Yeah. What we did is we — because it’s very difficult to use scraping software on something like LinkedIn. They made sure that that’s not something that people can do easily. We had to manually go through a variety of posts. Essentially what we did is we analyzed a total 561 posts across 48 Pulse channels.

Sean Jackson: Holy cow! 561 posts.

Gericke: Yes.

Sean Jackson: Across multiple channels. Got it.

Gericke: Yeah, 48 channels. What we really aimed for was to understand — at a maximum of 15 posts, the 15 top posts in each channel. What did they look like in terms of their views, the number of comments, and the shares that they each have? That would determine success. Because when we did some preliminary research, we found that LinkedIn uses those things as a basis to determine how articles are managed in the Pulse platform.

Sean Jackson: Okay. Let me go ahead and interject, because you’ve set it up. You went through all of these different articles, 500-plus. You had 48-plus channels that you would look through. You were analyzing them. Obviously, if you’re writing about big data, you obviously have some data science behind you. Let’s cut to the chase, and let’s talk about what you found were some of the most important things that our audience probably is not aware of when it comes to that LinkedIn algorithm, when it actually comes to publishing. What are some of the things, when they’re actually publishing, that they need to be aware of?

Why Engagement Metrics Matter in Getting Ranked Higher in LinkedIn

Gericke: The number-one thing that they need to know — once again, we’ve derived this. Whether it’s the actual way that things are being done is still a question, but what we derived is that the algorithm is probably triggered by the velocity at which an article is distributed across the system. Which means that when an article is shared, and not just by yourself, but by your friends and people in groups — and it generates a number of views (and that’s over a certain period), the speed at which that happens seems to trigger the algorithm to pick up on it in the first place.

Sean Jackson: Okay. Let me clarify. The more engagement it has, the more shares, the more views — comments? Would that be part of it?

Gericke: Yeah. Comments is very critical.

Sean Jackson: Okay. When we look at the engagement metrics. When an article is first published. And I believe in your research you were saying days of the week — maybe like a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I think you had Wednesday —

Gericke: Wednesday, right.

Sean Jackson: Right. Is that when you first put it out there, that initial spike, if it’s getting people that are sharing it, are liking it, are putting comments on it, that’s going to improve the velocity by which the algorithm is picking it up in the index to share with everybody out there. Got it. Okay.

Gericke: Indeed. That’s the first thing that they need to know. The second thing is that once the algorithm notices this article and the speed at which it’s distributed, it will start looking at where it fits into the Pulse platform in terms of the channels that it might align with. The way that we deduced it does that is first by looking at titles and seeing if it picks up on certain keywords, and then analyzing the content to see if the content aligns with the title.

What we assume is happening based on some of the reading that we’ve done and some of the technical explanations that’s been offered by LinkedIn as well, is that it seems